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Huber's New Observations on the Natural History of Bees

16K views 84 replies 25 participants last post by  merops_apiaster 
#1 ·
I've been cleaning up the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) version from "The Hive and the Honey Bee Collection". I have an original (different edition than that one) but the binding is shot so I've been reading the online text one. Of course all the "s"s are "f"s and it's very difficult to make sense of it. Anyway, I found these excerpts interesting:

"The worm of workers passes three days in the egg, five in the vermicular state, and then the bees close up its cell with a wax covering. The worm-now begins spinniiig its cocoon, in whichoperation thirty-fix hours are consumed. In three days, it changes to a nymph, and passes six days in this form. It is only on the twentieth day of its existence, counting from the moment the egg is laid, that it attains the fly sate."

François Huber, 4 September 1791. From the 1806 edition of "New Observations on the Natural History of Bees" page 151

http://bees.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=bees;cc=bees;sid=59f245051efcbff8255002f160444e72;rgn=full%20text;idno=5017286;view=image;seq=0009

Isn't this a shorter capping time and shorter emergence time? Twenty days instead of the currently accepted 21? Wasn't Huber on natural sized comb? Eight hours shorter is adequate to stabilize varroa populations.

It's not difficult, of course, to verify shorter capping and post capping times on natural sized cells. But it is helpful, if you let them make their own, to measure it on various sizes since they will build from 5.1mm to 4.6mm and the times run from about 20 days for 5.1mm to 19 days on 4.95mm to 18 days on 4.6mm give or take some time depending on the temperatures and the strength of the hive. Cool weather and weak hives tend to lengthen the times.

And how about comb spacing?

"The leaf or book hive consists of twelve vertical frames or boxes, parallel to each other, and joined together the sides, should be twelve inches long, and the cross spars, nine or ten; the thickness of these spars an inch, and their breadth fifteen lines (one line = 1/12". 15 lines = 1 1/4" = 32mm). It is necessary that this last measure should be accurate"

http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/length (If you want to see how much a line is put in 12 for lines and convert to see one inch. Then put in 15 lines and convert to see 1.25 inches and 31.75mm)

François Huber, 18. August 1789. From the 1806 edition of "New Observations on the Natural History of Bees" page 5.

http://bees.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=bees;cc=bees;sid=59f245051efcbff8255002f160444e72;rgn=full%20text;idno=5017286;view=image;seq=0009

Isn't the "accepted" number for natural comb for a European bee 35mm (1 3/8")? But Huber's observation is the same as what is currently accepted for AHB or Scutella which is 32mm. And consistent with my observations that it averages about 32mm and goes as small as 30mm:

http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bush/images/CombSpacing30.JPG

Obviously natural cell size has always been about 32mm spacing on combs and twenty days or less from egg to emergence. Or at least since 1806.
 
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#52 ·
Wow, Jim,

Not sure why my understanding of what you said was insulting to you. Obviously I misunderstood your meaning. I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything as uncivil as implying that you may be a mouse, or indicate that you may be unable to engage in adult conversation.

That would have been very impolite, especially since I "have never met" you.

Maybe you could improve my understanding of your comments.

I am not sure that you "disagree with me", so you will have to guess again as to the reason for my horrid behavior.

As to "tossing around insults", well throw in a good dose of condescension, reread your posts over the last couple of years, and take a look in the mirror.

Hello, pot! I'm the kettle! ;)
 
#53 ·
> Not sure why my understanding of what you said
> was insulting to you.

Yeah, right.


> Maybe you could improve my understanding of
> your comments.

Its easy - in regard to capping times and
emergence times, I don't know, and neither
do you, or anyone else. We don't have good
data yet. I'm sorry if my refusal to drink
the Kool-Aid on this issue conflicts with your
need to believe in something or other.

It is unfortunate that you made your presumptuous
and unsolicited attempt to "translate" a very
clear and simple response to a question asked by
someone else, but don't try to now pretend that
you had some intent other than being insulting.

> ...condescension...

Many folks reading these posts are new to the
craft, so we all need to remember that we need
to explain what we are talking about just a
little more. If you view doing that as being
"condescending", that's a personal problem.
I can't help you with that.

Gotta put the Palm away now, as it takes two
hands to pull supers, and I'm going to be busy
doing that until dark today.
 
#54 ·
We don't have good
data yet.
Who is we, and how do you know this?

I'm sorry if my refusal to drink
the Kool-Aid on this issue conflicts with your
need to believe in something or other.
Does calling a belief in something "drinking Kool-Aid" count as explaining "just a little more", or is it just plain condescending? And I have no need to believe in small cell theory or even in "something or other", so your refusal to "drink the Kool-Aid" conflicts with nothing at all.

And no pretending at all Jim - my only intent was to let you know how your posts come across. That is exactly what I wrote, nothing more, nothing less. I am not the only person who has pointed out how your posts come across. If finding out how your posts sound to me is insulting to you, "that's a personal problem. I can't help you with that."

And in all seriousness, best of luck with your harvesting.
 
#55 ·
As a newbee I've followed this thread with interest. This past Sat. (Jun 25) we had our summer meeting (IN State Beekeepers Assn) and our guest speaker was Dr. Jamie Ellis from Univ.GA. Dr. Ellis' main (morning) topic was SHB, but spoke in the afternoon on the topic of IPM.

With respect to this thread, I specifically asked Dr. Ellis an open-ended question about small cell and his thoughts concerning its effectiveness with Varroa.

Summarizing his response, he thought small cell was definitely the way to go because of the shorter brood cycle times which disrupt varroa reproduction. In agreement with Mr. Fischer, he noted that there hasn't been serious, hard-core scientific studies to confirm this, but he felt that the amount of anecdotal and informal studies clearly pointed to shorter emergence times. He noted that even if the reduced times are only about 6 hours, it would be enough to mess up the Varroa cycles. He added that this is being studied and it is only a matter of time before there are published results.
 
#56 ·
Hi Guys,

I haven't been back to this topic for awhile. And it's quite surprising how the topic has changed! I went back and reviewed the old posts to see what happened. And sadly enough, I see where I have contributed to this mess.

Sometimes, I feel just like a little kid, back in school, on the playground. And sometimes I even act like one!

Sorry Guys
Dennis
 
#57 ·
"I am perfectly willing to insult others whom
I have never met, and put words in their mouth
that are hurtful, all to advance an opinion
about something that would simpler and easier
to test. I contribute insults rather than
something of value, as I have nothing of value
to offer, yet I hold disdain for the simple
statement "we don't know yet", and anyone who
disagrees with me.

A summary of the translation:

"I am unable to engage in adult conversation,
so I will toss around insults, as that is easier."

To summarize the summary of the translation:

"I am a mouse, studying to be a rat."
The above sais I do believe that if you do not have any thing constructive to say and not to tear some one down Go be a rat somewhere else. This board is to help others that need or want the help not to rant and rave to try and prove that you are better than all here. I will not argue with Jim Fisher but I can recomend SUSPENSION from this board if the "RAT" continues to degrade this board. The reasons many good people leave the board is because of the "RAT" comments. We do not need people such as this'
MY thoughts on the subject.
Clint
 
#58 ·
> The above sais I do believe that if you do not
> have any thing constructive to say not to
> tear some one down Go be a rat somewhere else.

Exactly.

> I can recomend SUSPENSION

I would not support that. Education is the
solution. People can't be educated if they
are shunned, expelled, or whatever. There
is not reason to silence anyone except a
"spammer".
 
#59 ·
That still does not give you the right to be so absusive to others. I belive YOU to be a SPAMMER doing this. I do agree on the education part but who gave you the right to be so "RAT" like?
Education is good but NOT the way your trying to do it.
Clint
 
#61 ·
> Hey, Jim! Clint was talking about suspending YOU!

I can't imagine why.
Feel free to propose it to the powers that be,
but there are no grounds for even suggesting it.

Please re-read indypartridge's comments posted
June 27th - she quotes someone who does NOT
bother to participate in this list, and thereby
avoids the slings and arrows, yet says exactly
what I've said. Funny how no one gets all hot
and bothered when Jamie Ellis says exactly what
I've been saying.

> I've seen people tossed for less antagonizing
> than you do.

The only reason why something may seem
"antagonizing", is that it is a rhetorical
argument that defies refutation.


Its is a sad, but fairly recent (post 1994)
development on the internet that so large
of a percentage of the people using the networks
can't seem to comprehend the difference between
disagreeing and being disagreeable.

Post AOL/Compuserve, and the opening of the
net to the general public, people stared to
band together into small tribes of like-minded
individuals, shunning those who might offer
alternative viewpoints.

Those of us who made a living patching up
the leaky pipes of "the net" for a quarter
century were not happy at all with this. In
horror, we realized that we had created networks
and software that facilitated alienation,
sometimes hatred between people.

So much for the whole "global village" thing. :(

> If you wern't... you'd been gone long ago.

Sorry, but that's a very personal attack, both
on the integrity of the folks who moderate, and
to a lesser extent, upon me.

You first appear to accuse whoever moderates
the various groups of some sort of favoritism
that certainly does not exist, and you second
presume to both create a policy that simply
does not exist, and accuse me of violating it.

The solution is simple - if you can't tolerate
rebuttal, don't dish out flat statements as if
they were engraved in stone, moreso when they
might encourage new beekeepers to adopt practices
that could endanger their bees, and cause yet
another person to give up the craft.

In short, yeah I'm a pragmatic hard-nose, but I
don't hold the slightest animosity towards anyone.
If you get angry, that's only because you can't
see me grinning as I type.

I'd LOVE to see someone prove that any random
bee, when downsized to "small cell", naturally
frustrates varroa reproduction. Whoever does
it will become famous, perhaps rich from all
the speaking engagements. I merely asked for
volunteers.

So, who wants to be famous, perhaps rich?
Anyone?

Remember, I said I'd help tweak it up, and
help to get it published in a real
peer-reviewed journal where it will be blessed
as Science with a capital "S". (I'd prefer
to get in the "Journal of Economic Entomology",
as that is where it would "fit" best.)
 
#62 ·
>Sorry, but that's a very personal attack, both
on the integrity of the folks who moderate, and
to a lesser extent, upon me.

Perhaps I should appoligize, I certainly did not mean it to be a personal attack, just a personal observation that I am sure is seen by many others here.

>You first appear to accuse whoever moderates
the various groups of some sort of favoritism
that certainly does not exist, and you second
presume to both create a policy that simply
does not exist, and accuse me of violating it.

Perhaps we should re-read the rules of conduct?

"You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use the BeeSource Bulletin Board to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violative of any law. You agree to be civil. You agree not to post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or by BeeSource.com."
 
#63 ·
> You agree, through your use of this service...

Don't be shy now, if you are going to CONTINUE
to make accusations, at least be specific.


Perhaps you'd rather use the "private message"
thingy, as such things are best taken offline
so as to not to bore others. Better yet,
e-mail me at any of:

jfischer at supercollider dot com
bee-quick at bee-quick dot com
james dot fischer at gmail dot com
 
#65 ·
> what's this supercollider business?
> Did you take it over or something??

No, I inherited it by consensus.

Fair warning!
Boring story with 0% bee content below!

When the superconducting supercollider was first
proposed, very few scientists were in favor of it.
It would provide limited value (proving things
that were already generally agreed to HAVE to be
true), at a cost that rivaled the defense budget.
Lots MORE good science could be done by spending
the tiny amounts of money spent on science
elsewhere. (Cheaper to let CERN build theirs,
and go over there and use the toy if we wanted
to, which was exactly what ended up happening.)

There were lots and lots of letters, studies,
and impassioned pleas written. I wrote one
myself. At the time I was at AT&T Bell Labs,
so we put up a gopher server (this was long
before html and "the web") as a central
repository for information both "for" and
"against". A library of sorts. This allowed
everyone to "publish" their own views without
flooding the journals with "letters", and
turning the journals into something akin to
a Yahoo Group, Bee-L, or alt.politics.talk
on UseNet.

So, think of "BeeSource", except everyone
wearing a white lab coat. There was not
much back-and-forth discussion, but there
was lots of very good analysis.

We called the machine "supercollider", for
obvious reasons. When GW Bush took office,
and started people digging a deep circular
ditch in his home state, AT&T legal asked
me to get it out of the research.att.com
domain and put the machine in its own domain,
as they did not want to risk having AT&T
being excluded from bidding on bits of the
project, or viewed as "disloyal" to the
stated goals of the administration.

Hence, "supercollider.com"

When I left the Labs to become a beekeeper
and live in the nether regions, AT&T asked
me to "please take THAT domain with you",
so I created "The Information Supercollider",
which (at the time) was the most powerful
supercomputer owned by a private individual,
a loosely-coupled array of DEC PDP-11/70s,
AT&T 3B20s, and Pyramid array processors
connected with fiber channel.
(Yeah, I'm a pack rat about processing power)

The concept was simple - take some data, and
accelerate it to nearly the speed of light,
and bang it against other data, so that only
truth survives the collision.


What paid the bills was work for radio
astronomers, take gigs and gigs of 1s and 0s,
and make pretty pictures. Sort of a Photomat
for pictures of the "deepest portions of the sky".

Nowadays, anyone can rack and stack PCs or Macs,
load up some Beowulf Cluster software, and
be limited only by their floor space and
electric bill. Many colleges have impressive
arrays, even some high schools have more gflops
than they know what to do with.

But its been my e-mail address for soooo long,
I'll keep the domain, even if I end up scrapping
the current array (Sun Sparc servers, bought
for pennies on the dollar after the dot com crash).

Aren't you SO glad you asked?
 
#67 ·
Jim,

actually it is kinda an interesting story
at the time they were argueing about putting it in GW's backyard or mine. There was talk of putting in here in NC.

As for honkin big machines, I put together a Beowulf cluster back then with ~30 pentium PC's.
(back when 100MHz was screamin)
We thought it was awesome. Used it to design camshafts for NASCAR racecars for GM. Lot's of gigaflops/$ :eek:
We were college students
No white coats
holey jeans, ratty tee-shirts and long hair :cool:

Dave
 
#68 ·
> Hey, Jim! Clint was talking about suspending YOU!

>>I can't imagine why.
>>Feel free to propose it to the powers that be,
but there are no grounds for even suggesting it.

And, there, folks, you have it in a nutshell. You can't help someone who won't acknowledge that they have a problem.

Too bad this thread deteriorated so from its original subject.

Mr. Bush, if you haven't totally abandoned this thread, I would like to say I have enjoyed reading of your experiments and observations. And also those of the posters who have addressed the issue.

Mr. Bemrose, I have to say I agree entirely with your assessment. I think anyone reading in this forum for a week or so would quickly recognize that.

Meanwhile, I wonder if there isn't some space where those of us who want to read about and share with others our studying of the honeybees might be able to do so without the static interference of individuals with obvious unaddressed personal issues which only detract from the discussion at hand. Too many of the adult discussions in this forum are being constantly interrupted by a child screaming for attention and, if it isn't given, dropping a load of his **** in the middle of the room where the discussion is being held.
 
#69 ·
This is an open invitation to join back to the original topic.
Personally, I do beleive that shorter emergence of the adult bees can have a detrimental effect on mites. Once yhe bee emerges, there is no longer any "protection or food for the maturing mites". I would like to compare it to uncapping the brood cells one or 1.5 days earlier: I bet the bees would be unable to hatch !!

There is one point which I have not seen on this thread: mites love drone brood more than worker brood. Do small cell bees also make drone cells smaller? Are small cell drones also hatching sooner?
 
#71 ·
i think it has to do with their life cycle and brood's devolopment dates

of course i'm tired today and i could be crapping out my mouth
 
#70 ·
Do small cell bees also make drone cells smaller? Are small cell drones also hatching sooner?
I have not seen many drones the size of the Hindenburgh lately, but generally speaking, from my experience with retrogressed bees they still make drones the same size as they did on foundation of 5.4mm. But the size of my drones do vary a great deal. I'm still trying to figure out what size it is that triggers the queen to lay a drone in a particular cell. Queens vary a great deal in size and I'm trying to study two hives of different size queens to evaluate whether or not the size of the queen determines how far she can fit her abdomen in a cell and whether or not this is a deciding factor on her choice to deposit a fertilized egg or not.

Neither queen has a problem laying brood in cells as small as 4.4 to 4.6mm, but I can't tell yet what the size is of the smallest drone cell.

Yes the drone cells of smaller sizes are hatching sooner, but again, the size of these cells vary a great deal, and the larger cells do take longer for the drone to hatch out.
 
#73 ·
but generally the cell size dictates the length of time it takes the bee from cocoon to emerge

still crapping out my face here
 
#75 ·
>Do small cell bees also make drone cells smaller? Are small cell drones also hatching sooner?

From my observation SOME of the drone brood in small cell is LARGER and some is SMALLER. I have no idea why, but there seems to be more variety of sizes. But to be honest most of my bees aren't really small cell, but rather natural cell, so the worker cells vary in size also.

I have not tried to measure capping and emergence times on different sized drone cells, but I would expect they would be simlar to the differences in worker brood e.g. that the smaller ones would emerge earlier and the larger ones later.
 
#76 ·
Jim,
Bees build in 3/4/5 proportions. Members of different sub-castes tend to work together, so bees of smallest size tend to work on projects with other bees of the same sizes. If these bees build drone cells, they will be 4/3rds the size of their worker cells.

If you want to test this you can use a sift to filter out the different sizes of bees and hive them. See what happens. This has already been done by several people, and maybe they published maybe they didn't, but I have done a little of this checking for fun and its about right on. If you can keep the bees from drifting back, you get combs of different sizes depending on what you have in each hive, and its a consistent 3/4/5 proportion.

I don't want to hear any gruff until you try it yourself. No one here has the wind at their back and no one is required to publish and no one is required to satisfy your particular needs. If you want verification they go ahead and verify it for yourself. Maybe its enough for each of us that "we see xyz, and so do 5 other people I know" if good enough. You mgith want to make that more like 10 people, or 100 because there are tons of people here and on other lists that will tell you to shove it simply because you require excellence in data structures and editting which really has nothing to do with beekeeping nor does it interest most beekeepers to keep tables of events. It bores the heck out of me just thinking about it.

I know this, my hives are all natural cell. I lost a total of 3 hives in 3 years now, and none were due to varoa as either direct result or subcumming to 2ndary diseases that resulted from varroa. They were all absconds because of wax or beetle.

All of my hives buildup so strong I can't afford the lumber to split them up as often as I would like.

As far as comb width is concerned. I use 32mm topbars. The combs cheat here and there, but its repairable from a long term standpoint. They cheat larger than 32mm because they build honey at the top of the comb, when they are done building honey and start building brood below, the combs are most visibly narrower. If I install combs at the earliest opportunity in spring, they build the combs perfectly without cheating larger. The cheat gets bigger as the season goes on and they are storing more honey in the tops of the topbar combs.

You don't need documentation to see it yoruself, just do it. Stop whining and just do it. Forget not having time, you have time enough to complain and keep this thread and others going to months, so you must have time for something if you get off of here, off of your butt and out in the beeyard and build some hives and try things out yourself. I don't care what you document, just try it and get a feel for it. Learning how to feel your bees will help you a lot more than reading numbers. I know my bees, I know what to expect from each hive, not because I documented it but because I know my bees and I can feel them as I approach. I know when they are going to be heavy with honey or nastier than ordinary simply because I feel and pay attention to it, not because I documented it.
 
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